War Room

When my Dad was a Displaced Person, he collected several folders of reproduced art prints. The subject matter of the prints is primarily related to World War II. Some prints also are representative of the German inter-war Expressionist movement.

Schweinfurt, Germany, about 1946. This piece is by Willi Geiger.

So Long, Farewell, Auf Wiedersehen, Adieu

The last of the von Trapp siblings, Maria von Trapp, has died. Heather Menzies-Urich portrayed her, as "Louisa," in "The Sound of Music."

9250 Kilometers

1940. This map shows the Germans' view of the European situation. Lithuania is the country colored in green.

"Nachthexen"

During World War II, the Germans called the Soviet Union's female fighter pilots "night witches:"

They often operated in stealth mode, idling their engines as they neared their targets and then gliding their way to their bomb release points. As a result, their planes made little more than soft "whooshing" noises as they flew by.

Those noises reminded the Germans, apparently, of the sound of a witch's broomstick. So the Nazis began calling the female fighter pilots Nachthexen: "night witches." They were loathed. And they were feared. Any German pilot who downed a "witch" was automatically awarded an Iron Cross.

Pro Memoria

This morning's post about the creep of Soviet imagery into the EU's celebratory poster prompted me to look again at "Pro Memoria," the primitive leaflet that chronicled the 1941 Soviet deportations. The firsthand narratives recount the numbers of Lithuanians shipped to the Gulag camps. The leaflet presents an inventory of "prisoners," cataloged according to the date of deportation, the Lithuanian town from which the deportees originated, the number of the railway car on which they traveled, and the location in the Soviet Union in which they served out their exile.

Pro Memoria's accounts parallel my family's memory of the Soviet occupation. Members of my Mom's and my Dad's families knew their names fell onto the second deportation list.

The Pro Memoria leaflet—a stapled packet that my Dad carried when my Parents emigrated to the United States—is in poor shape. Given its condition, I decided to post it here.

Be patient with the narrative's fractured English spelling and grammar. English was not the first language of the authors—for most, it was the fifth or sixth language:

[The page numeration skips from 1 to 4.]

  

Riverbed History

A drought reveals historical treasures.

(Via Boing Boing.)

"The knock came at 06:00 on the dark, snowy morning of 10 February 1940."

A moving story of survival during World War II.

"We will take care to keep this Booklet clean!"

After my Mom graduated from high school, she selected this photo for both her internal passport and for her medical-school identification at Vytautas Magnus University.

Kaunas, Lithuania, 1941. Mom still wears her high-school uniform in this photo.

*     *     *     *     *

Here is the photo, in context, as part of Mom's medical-school "Studijų Knygelė," or "Studies Booklet." The Booklet acted as both a form of identification and as a report card. After the inside cover, reproduced below, establishes the student's identity, the remaining twenty or so pages consist of a record of the courses the student took, the professors who taught the courses, the date the student completed coursework, and the grades the students earned in each class.

Kaunas, Lithuania, 1941. When the Germans closed the university, many professors continued teaching classes on an "audit" basis. Occasionally, the professors conducted these "auditing" classes in their homes; later, they sometimes secured permission to use classrooms. Eventually, the Germans reopened the medical school.

Evidence of these developments appears on Mom's Booklet. The word "studentas" is crossed out in black ink and replaced with the word "hospitantė," or "auditor." Mom became an auditor when the school closed. Later, the red-inked "studentė" (the feminine form of "student") replaced "hospitantė," indicating that the school had reopened, and Mom reenrolled as a regular student.

The Booklet also shows a glimmer of the authoritarian nature of those times. At the bottom of the inside cover appears an admonishment: "Šią Knygelė išsaugokime švarią!" In English, that reads, "We will take care to keep this Booklet clean!"

Beginnings

Kaunas, Lithuania, 1940. My Dad's twin sister, Jonė, stands on the right with two medical-school classmates. The Nazis closed the school shortly after they launched the occupation of Lithuania.

Thanks to my Toronto Cousin for making this photo available to us.

Lithuania in World War II: Cinematographic Documentary

That's the English translation for the 2006 documentary, Lietuva antrąjame pasauliniame kare: Kino dokumentai . Rimtautas Šilinis directed the documentary, and Kęstutis Petrulis produced it for "Studija 2."

The film, based on newsreels and Soviet and Nazi propaganda footage, traces Lithuania's predicament between 1940 and 1945, when the country sat between two powers that sought to swallow it into their respective empires.

The film begins with the 1940 Soviet invasion, Bolshevik cultural immersion, and Siberian deportations. It then follows with the Nazi invasions and occupation of 1941 and, finally, reaches the 1944 reoccupation by the Soviets.

The film brought to my eyes many of the accounts my Parents related. There's a clip, for example, that shows people fleeing the country in 1944. They take few belongings: some carry only a few parcels; others use wheelbarrows to transport cherished items.

If you don't read Lithuanian (or if you don't understand Russian or German), then you still should be able to follow much of the film based on the footage alone.